Freelancing for Newspapers: Writing for an Overlooked Market - Review

Many writers feel that newspapers will soon be obsolete and therefore don't take the opportunity to write for them. Nothing could be further than the truth. Newspapers are still in full swing (check the statistics in Chapter One) and have added to their popularity by building an online presence to boot.

There are so many ways in which we can harness our writing and angle it toward this overlooked market. Sue Fagalde Lick takes that point of view in her book and explains just how to do it. With exercises, advice and a plethora of ideas, even the most skeptical of writers can change their mind (myself included) and put them to good use in advancing their freelance career into a new dimension.

Learn how to develop and research newspaper article ideas, conduct interviews, pitch your story, flesh out and write a clean copy, and more importantly, get paid for your story and acquire more assignments.

Freelancing for Newspapers includes eleven pages of resources, informs authors of their rights, and discusses standard manuscript format, tracking sheets and much more. Chapter Seven goes through each stage of writing a newspaper article, while Chapter Eight covers the rewriting process. Discover how to angle your articles in various ways so that you can resell them, thus adding to your skills as a writer, while adding more clips to your portfolio.

The reader comes to understand the newspaper business and that of being a freelance writer for it. For instance, how many types of newspaper articles can you name? In her book Lick covers personality profiles, refrigerator journalism, roundups, how-to articles, op-eds, reviews, travel articles, columns, human interest stories, business features, personal experience articles, home and garden stories, along with investigative and news stories. And I bet you thought that some of these types of articles only appeared in magazines.

As a newspaper reporter, photographer, editor and freelance writer, Sue is well qualified to write such a book. To her credit she can add a BA in journalism and a MFA in creative non-fiction. She has taught several writing workshops both online and at a local community college. Besides the above mentioned, she has published three books on Portuguese Americans and has lost count of the numerous articles that she has written for newspapers and magazines alike. Yet with all this, Sue is humble enough to let you in on some of the mistakes she made along the way.

Take a fresh look at your freelance writing opportunities, as I did, and try the newspaper market. You just may find that it is just what you've been looking for all along.

Title: Freelancing for Newspapers: Writing for an Overlooked Market
Author: Sue Fagalde Lick
Publisher: Quill Driver Books (2007)
ISBN-10: 1884956688
ISBN-13: 978-1884956683
My Rating - 4 out of 5